Blue Mountains

Sunday 6 March
     Today I went to the Blue Mountains. The mountains are about 3 hours outside of Sydney so we took a mini coach bus for the day because there were only 12 of us going. We started off by stopping at Featherdale Wildlife Park.

Baby Wallaby! He's only 8 months old!

Here we got to see all kinds of Australian animals. It was different because a lot of the animals weren't caged. We were walking around the Koala area and suddenly there was a Wallaby right by my leg. I got to feed wallabies and kangaroos again!

Feeding Kangaroos. 

These ones were more in your face though... and there were emu in the same area and one almost poked my eye. Yikes! It was really fun though, I got to see a tasmanian devil up close (he went back in the shade too fast to get picture though) and a some wombats.

Wombat

  

















 After an hour at the park we got on the bus and headed up to the mountains. We arrived at about 11:15. We started by going to a lookout and I have to say, the pictures do not do it justice. Everything was so beautiful!

First lookout.

Stringy eucalyptus.

     After the lookout we headed on a mini hike down to another lookout, and on the way our guide told us about the different trees and the mountains. He told us about this one tree which is a called the stingy eucalyptus. This tree is very unique in that the bark is stringy, its hard to explain but there is a picture below. Anyways, the leave on this tree give off a specific oil and smell that linger near the leaves and when it gets hot it catches on fire. This is the only way to open the seeds of the tree. So the bark also  catches and falls away from the tree and covers the opened seeds so the tree stays alive, and the ash helps the seeds grow. These trees have been imported into California and have become a huge problem with the wild fires.
     After this we made it down to the second lookout and it was so beautiful. There was a little waterfall and we could see all kinds of walkways. We took a so many pictures! There was apparently a snake near one spot, but I stayed far away from that.
     Once we were done taking pictures we headed back to the bus and went to the town Katoomaba for  lunch. My friends and I found a little bakery that was cheap. (Its really hard to find anything cheap here so we were really excited and stocked up!)


After lunch we headed to another lookout to see the 3 sisters formation. Here is the legend of the 3 sisters:


The Aboriginal dream-time legend has it that three sisters, 'Meehni', 'Wimlah' and Gunnedoo' lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe.
These beautiful young ladies had fallen in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, yet tribal law forbade them to marry.
The brothers were not happy to accept this law and so decided to use force to capture the three sisters causing a major tribal battle.
As the lives of the three sisters were seriously in danger, a witchdoctor from the Katoomba tribe took it upon himself to turn the three sisters into stone to protect them from any harm. While he had intended to reverse the spell when the battle was over, the witchdoctor himself was killed. As only he could reverse the spell to  return the ladies to their former beauty, the sisters remain in their magnificent rock formation as a reminder of this battle for generations to come.

3 sisters. 

World's steepest rail. YIKES!

     After we headed to Scenic World. Here we hiked down into the valley. It was fun but a lot of work. I could definitely feel it in my knees about half way. After about an hour we made it to our destination. The world's steepest rail. It is literally almost vertical! We got to ride it back to the top. It took and hour to get down and about 1 minute to get back up. I wasn't scared to ride it until it started to move. There were no seatbelts, so I had to hold myself in my seat by way of the seat in front of me. After that we went through the gift shop and got back on the bus and headed for home.